By Any Means Necessary

One of the most resonant texts of twentieth century economic speculation is J M Keynes's 1930 essay The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in which he predicted a 15-hour week within 100 years. The reason for the continuing fascination is the idea that technology and growth can deliver Utopia; that a life of easeful pleasure is within our grasp, even some way short of a post-scarcity economy. The essay got a further mention the other day in a conventional (though witty) column by Andrew Martin advocating a 4-day working week. What was poignant was to see this staring across the fold in The Guardian at an investigation into the growth of food banks.

Following a gradual reduction in working hours over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a bifurcation in developed economies after 1980. For unskilled labour, average work hours have shrunk, while low-wages have required many to extend their total work hours over multiple jobs. This is the root cause of the growth of food banks: there just aren't enough adequately-paid unskilled jobs to go round and social security is increasingly threadbare. For the skilled, there has been a twin movement of increased time off (paid holidays, parental leave, part-time working etc) and presenteeism (i.e. hanging around for reasons of status rather than productivity).

The high-profile of the latter gives rise to middle class angst summed up by The New Yorker recently as: How did we get so busy? The answer is that work time is increasingly a positional good, i.e. a "fictitious commodity" distinct from labour power. The emblematic forms of this appear first at the margins, in feminised job-shares and nepotistic interns, dissolving the relationship between labour and status. For high-status (and predominantly male) roles, the "always on" joys of corporate email have partially replaced the traditional arenas of performative loyalty and politicking down the pub, club or golf course. A parallel change has been the increasing professionalisation of management - i.e. the construction of a pseudo-scientific discipline through MBAs and rule-books - which means that footloose executives often lack an understanding of a business and value their ignorance of operational detail ("it's about strategic vision"). Rent-seeking remains a growth area of the economy.

Conventional economics sees no mystery in the failure of the 15 hour week to arrive, though it remains fascinated by Keynes's idea. A 2010 MIT collection of essays, Keynes Revisited, quoted in the New Yorker article, explained this failure variously: human inventiveness creates ever more new products, so we keep working to acquire more new stuff; we also work to achieve self-actualisation, which may just mean avoiding our families and meeting new sexual partners; and how much we work is conditioned by social norms as much as practical need, hence the sensual French have more holidays than puritanical Americans. These are essentially sociological explanations, which might seem odd coming from economists, until you consider the influence of rational choice theory (Gary Becker was a key contributor) and that the essays were written in the immediate aftermath of 2008, when conventional economics was trying to avoid catching our eye.

The influence of Becker leads to the assumption that the hours we work are a matter of personal choice, a trade-off necessitated by the inescapable scarcity of time. This might be dismissed as just a determination to keep the concept of scarcity at the heart of orthodox economics at a time of growing capital abundance, however I think it also relates to the ideological importance of competition, present in the idea that we have many demands competing for our attention. A key feature of the digital economy is its dependence on our time as both a scarce resource and a tradable commodity: we spend time with apps as much as we spend money; we pay for free services with our time and our liminal attention; we seek to turbo-boost our social connections, replacing inefficient face-time with instant messages and broadcasts. The boundary between work and leisure has been blurred by social media. This presents a challenge to both Keynes and his critics: where does work stop and non-work start?

This is part of a wider cultural turn since the 1970s centred on the idea of competition: not just with each other in an economic or quasi-economic context, but with ourselves in the internalisation of biopower (diets, gym, lifelogging), or through fetish objects (from Tamagochi to smartphones) and the status competition of social media. As Will Davies notes: "At  key moment in the history of neoliberal thought, its advocates shifted from defending markets as competitive arenas amongst many, to viewing society-as-a-whole as one big competitive arena. Under the latter model, there is no distinction between arenas of politics, economics and society. To convert money into political power, or into legal muscle, or into media influence, or into educational advantage, is justifiable, within this more brutal, capitalist model of neoliberalism".



Inequality is then the rightful product of competition. However, this is not the same justification as the "superior rewards to talent" deployed in response to Thomas Piketty, but a more brutal acceptance that winning "by any means necessary" is its own justification. This can be thought of as the oligarch's defence, and has obvious implications for the effectiveness of democracy. It also has implications for the working day. If you believe you are engaged in a competition at all levels of activity - from the absurd "global race" through commercial rivalry to empire-building and jockeying within a company - and that this competition has no rules or constraints, not only will corporate malfeasance be normalised and "gamification" accepted as routine, but you will be constantly working the angles to preserve or improve your own position as "the entrepreneur of yourself". In such circumstances, taking time off is tantamount to conceding the game.

But there is a problem here, an incipient crisis. If automation continues to replace labour with abundant capital, if we reach "peak jobs", working time will inevitably become scarcer, even if we engineer more supernumerary roles. The current ideological valorisation of "hard-working" may be nothing more than the anxiety of musical chairs. What do we do once the music stops? A job guarantee scheme cannot work beyond a stop-gap, unless we want to commit to the creation of a new helot class in perpetuity, alongside an employment elite who are constantly at work in the same sense that the aristocracy once was. A guaranteed basic income might be a more palatable solution for capital, as it does not necessarily compromise ownership or power, but this means it would probably be framed as a subsidy to labour (i.e. a dole), rather than a social dividend (i.e. the individual's share of technological progress), so the tendency towards the parsimonious is likely to lead to social conflict.

If we think of a basic income as "buying off" labour (i.e. a market intervention, akin to a set-aside scheme), the principle of social equality will, ironically, lead to that time being priced at a minimum level - we won't buy back the time of the skilled at a higher price. This means we will buy off the time of the poor (the un- and under-employed) first, so retaining high work hours will be entrenched as a sign of status ("scarce" workers, aka "talent", will be exempted altogether). Buying back time on a pro-rata basis across all jobs would actually be better in the long run (it's a transitional measure that would gradually disappear), but it's a non-starter politically in the short run: why should a lawyer's free time be worth more than a binman's?

Another option is to revive popular capitalism by giving workers shares in the robots as their hours decline ("Workers can earn more of their income from capital than from working - by owning part of the robots that replace them ... rather than rely on government income redistribution policies"), but this looks about as credible as previous attempts at popular share-ownership under Thatcher and Yeltsin, which were clearly never intended to dilute actual capital accumulations. Unless the purchasing power of declining wages increases, shares will soon migrate to cash and ownership will once more be concentrated in the hands of the rich.

The point to remember about Keynes's 1930 essay, and the reason its still resonates, is that it was a defence of capitalism, in the form of technological innovation and the wonders of compound interest, at a time when many were questioning it in light of the 1929 crash. Keynes believed that if it were "managed" (through population control, technocracy and the avoidance of war - i.e. Edwardian liberal shibboleths), then it would surely deliver the "bliss" of a 15-hour week. This ignores the fact that all changes in working hours, from the Victorian Factory Acts to the EU Working Time Directive, have depended on legislation and enforcement by the state. Working time is a social construct, and thus a political choice.

That choice is between a competitive, market-based solution, which cannot but immiserate the majority to preserve the privileges of a minority, or a cooperative solution, which cannot avoid the same outcomes unless it is applied equally across all jobs, which means socialism. Given the ideological investment in our flexible labour market by all political parties since the 1980s, and the continuing obeisance to the interests of "business", it is likely that the former path will be the one taken, with the politics reduced to quibbling over the degree of immiseration. In that sense "austerity", at a point in history when we are collectively richer than ever and perfectly capable of spending our way to both higher growth and greater equality, is looking like a fixture of the century rather than a temporary aberration.

Match of the Day

The 1982 World Cup in Spain was the first that enthralled me as a tournament (1974 and 1978 were both a bit grim), largely because of the fascinating contrast in styles, nowhere better exemplified than in the semi-final between France and Germany, though the subsequent final between the Germans and a victorious Italy was also compelling (Marco's Tardelli's manic goal celebration etc). Today's France-Germany clash will do well to stand comparison with a match that finished 3-3 after extra time, featured Schumacher's infamous "bumming" of Battiston, and was the first World Cup match to be settled by a penalty shootout.

France were pretty ordinary at the start of the tournament, beginning with a defeat to England and Bryan Robson's first minute goal. The unusual format, with two group stages before the semis, allowed them time to get their increasingly fluid game together, based around the midfield of Platini, Giresse and Tigana. Though they lost the semi-final, they would go on to deservedly win the European Championship in 1984. Germany had also been unconvincing, losing to Algeria in the first group stage and drawing with England in the second, but would go on to to reach a further two finals in succession, winning in 1990. Though the flowering of the game after Italia 90 owed much to economic and social change, the 1982 tournament in Spain, and that semi-final in particular, was a key step in the aesthetic rehabilitation of football that occurred during the 80s.

If form is any guide, this could be a corker (so assume I've put the mockers on it). For the Arsenal fan, Germany must be favourites (3 squad players versus 2 - Sagna having left the building), but the romantic in me will be just as happy if the French win it after an epic struggle. Today's other quarter-final, Brazil versus Colombia, looks difficult to call, largely because it will probably depend on how well Neymar and Rodriguez play on the night. This highlights a difference between the American and European teams, namely that the former are heavily-dependant on a single player (Argentina without Messi would be distinctly average), while the latter each have a handful of game-changers, some on the bench. For this reason, I suspect we may see a European team win a tournament in the Americas for the first time.

Though only one of France and Germany can go through, both squads, and those of Belgium and Holland, looks to have greater depth and flexibility than Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica. My hunch is that Germany have the edge, mainly because they have more "square pegs" who can spring a surprise, such as Muller, Ozil and Gotze, which is interesting in itself given the national stereotype of precision engineered components. Germany look endearingly shambolic, from their makeshift full-backs, through Mertesacker's lack of a third-gear, to Thomas Muller's socks. Up against Jurgen Klinsmann's Californicated chinos and teeth in the last 16 round, Joachim's Low's impression of an anxious metrosexual restrauteur was a hoot.

In contrast, the French look like they mean business, closer to Les Paras than the Musketeers of 1982. Didier Deschamps is the embodiment of "obdurate", but the team's success owes much to the rapid forward movement from midfield of Matuidi, Valbuena and Pogba. They have a determination that echoes Platini & co. I suspect Germany will sit deep this time, rather than risk a high line and reliance on Neuer's eccentric sweeping, though this will allow France to bring on Giroud later to exploit crosses and produce layoffs. Germany will need some hard running in the middle of the park, so how they use Khedira and Schweinsteiger could prove crucial to the result. It's a fascinating prospect.

Monkey Tennis

The victims of Stuart Hall, Max Clifford and Rolf Harris have talked about the mesmeric nature of fame, and how it can make you unable to resist abuse while simultaneously grateful for the attention. The same mechanism was exploited by Jimmy Savile, but his is a more important case because his career of abuse depended on connivance and willed ignorance by others in authority. In this sense, he has more in common with Rebekah Brooks, despite her innocence of phone-hacking, in terms of modus operandi.

Hall and Harris are examples of the petty abuse of power - the corruption common to minor functionaries and bullies - opportunistically taking advantage of the impressionable and vulnerable who crossed their paths. Clifford was more parasitical, exploiting his proximity to celebrities while exhibiting loathing of himself (the obsession with his knob) and many of his erstwhile clients. The common theme is opportunity and a lack of moral scruple where temptation was concerned. In contrast, Savile and Brooks saw power in instrumental and transactional terms and set out to amass it, the one through a strategy of self-promotion and the other through relentless networking. The distinction is between the idea of celebrity as an intrinsic quality - personal talent or prestige - and a form of capital that is accumulated.

As the media for projecting a personality have increased in scope and number over time, celebrity has not concentrated but proliferated. Instead of Big Brother we have the Z-list. Celebrity has become a profuse commodity. In their different ways, both Savile and Brooks appreciated that the growth in bandwidth meant an increasing demand for content. Savile was a hustler and a "self-punter", for ever making grandiose claims and pushing self-interested schemes. It was like Alan Partridge and Monkey Tennis but without the humour. Brooks was ultimately the product of changing economics, as falling paper sales led to a turn away from expensive hard news towards celebrity gossip and synthetic anger. An irony of the phone-hacking trial is the extent to which the tabloids came to rely on premium-rate phonelines, from inhouse competitions to sex-chat adverts. That, rather than the vulnerability of voice-mail, was the significant impact of mobile phone technology on newspapers: it changed the revenue dynamic.

Jeremy Hunt recently insinuated that Savile's long history of abuse in NHS hospitals was the product of institutional failure and personal negligence, and thus consistent with the government's critique of the organisation. He was predictably coy about the evidence that hospitals turned a blind eye because of the fund-raising and publicity that Savile's involvement brought. Suggesting that dependence on external finance might be corrupting is not politically helpful when you're trying to open up the NHS to private providers. Savile wasn't indulged because he was "just Jimmy", but because he was important to revenue. This was transactional.

Savile's abuse was not the product of his actual celebrity. Rather he parlayed his limited celebrity as a third-rate DJ and charmless laughing-stock into a career as a charity fund-raiser. It was this that provided the opportunity to gain privileged access to vulnerable victims, and also access to other power networks that could advance and protect him (Christmas with Thatcher etc). His appetite for public service campaigns (Clunk-Click, The Age of the Train) was mirrored in his walking from Lands End to John O'Groats three times: literally national coverage. Jim'll Fix It was an inspired idea, from his perspective. Initially, the BBC did have concerns about what was being "fixed", but in terms of the risks of product placement by conniving businesses. Throughout his life, Savile was a fixer and influence-peddler, and someone who instinctively understood the commodity nature of celebrity.

Rebekah Brooks's defence in the phone-hacking trial boiled down to persistent ignorance in her role as editor. She had to construct a personality for the jury that was both incompetent (she knew nothing) and sympathetic (she was distracted by fertility treatment, the breakup of her first marriage, her anti-paedophile campaign etc). What this left was the reality of a relentless operator who cultivated relationships for instrumental ends and was incapable of distinguishing between sentimentality and ethical principles. The post-verdict speech - "I've learnt some valuable lessons and hopefully I'm the wiser for it" - was straight out of the embarrassed politician's playbook.

Brooks's rise and subsequent fall has fascinated the broadsheets, who despise her for not being a "real" journalist and for being too much the schmoozer (and Blair's mate). The flame-haired witch trope and the many testaments to her flirtatious charm are the sort of jejune sexism you can expect from ex-public schoolboys who go weak at the knees when a woman touches their arm. Some of the contempt is self-deluding romanticism: an affront to the ideal of the principled, campaigning editor from CP Snow to Lou Grant. Some of it is class contempt: the conflation of the tabloid readership's presumed gullibility and prurience with the amorality of the journos and their seedy sub-contractors. Some of it is unease because her career reveals that running a newspaper is just a branch of PR, which perhaps gives an insight into the empathy that Cameron had for both her and Coulson.

Being a propaganda organ is hardly novel for a newspaper, but this is now pursued on an "industrial scale" by a global corporation like News Corp / Fox News, rather than being simply the byproduct of institutional prejudice. It is noticeable how many "campaigns" in the popular press these days are confected: an over-promoted combination of the unobjectionable and the marginal. We have moved from resonant social issues, such as Rachmanism and Thalidomide, to the hyperbolic sentimentality of Sarah's Law and Our Brave Boys. This is partly economics again: the tabloids are averse to funding major investigations while the broadsheets find it easier and cheaper to operate closer to home, hence the bias towards government scandals (cash for questions, MPs' expenses etc) and the incestuous relationship with The Met, who artlessly provide both investigatory legwork and their own dirty linen. Corporate power has never had it so easy, despite the periodic chuntering about tax avoidance.

David Cameron's apology in respect of Andy Coulson suggests both a man who didn't trouble to enquire too closely into his appointee's past (which feeds the stereotype of the PM as a lazy chancer), but a better interpretation would be that his willed ignorance was simply the product of being at ease with a man he understood. Coulson's attraction was not his empathy for the common man (feeding the stereotype of the cabinet as out-of-touch elitists), which is hardly a rare gift, but his connections with News International and his proven media-management skills. This was transactional. Rupert Murdoch has emerged from the scandal commercially stronger, largely because of the defensive separation of newsprint from TV. The money spent on defending Brooks, Coulson et al is chicken-feed if it provides an effective firebreak against a prosecution under the US Foreign and Corrupt Practises Act.

The different verdicts for Coulson and Brooks reflect their different operational involvement in "editing": the one a hack, the other a networker. Brooks's wilful ignorance about what was going on in her own newspaper would be amusing if it weren't typical of executive behaviour: covering her arse through "empowerment" and plausible deniability. Whereas Coulson was interested in celebrity purely as a commodity, something he could transform into stories and circulation, Brooks was seduced by a belief in her own intrinsic power. She was a user as well as a dealer, trading up through the celeb hierarchy from Piers Morgan via Ross Kemp to Blair and the Chipping Norton set.

There is a contrast to be made here with George Entwhistle, a BBC lifer who was technically well-qualified for the Director General role but completely at sea when trying to handle the politics outside the walls of Broadcasting House: the exact opposite of Brooks. In his case, empowerment was his undoing. An experienced arse-coverer would have issued an email to all staff on day one stating that in light of the Savile allegations any stories concerning sexual abuse would have to be cleared with the DG's office before broadcast. This would have been contrary to his instincts and experience, but exactly the sort of thing that an astute politician would have done.

When confronted with the crimes of Savile, some contemporaries, like Esther Rantzen, have excused their blindness by claiming that it was a more innocent era with different standards of behaviour. This is self-serving nonsense. Sexual abuse is not a recent invention but a common aspect of power relations. What has changed since the 1970s is that authority has shrunk in some institutional areas, such as teaching and medicine, while it has grown in other marketised areas, such as management and celebrity. This is a product of neoliberalism, which has delivered enhanced power to executives while imposing greater inspection on workers. This shift in authority is reflected in changes in opportunity and temptation: more cocaine in the boardroom, less petty pilfering. The result is that there are fewer cases of teachers abusing pupils (though these few get blanket media exposure), but more cases of headteachers abusing funds (routinely hushed-up outside the public sector).

The growth in cases of historic and contemporary sexual abuse by celebrities reflects a growth in the quantum of newsworthy "slebs" and a parallel growth in the demand for salacious content by both bored consumers and cash-strapped media. There has not been a shift in morality. What has happened is the arrival of multi-channel TV, the Internet, and the symbiotic recycling of these two by newspapers. We live in the age of Monkey Tennis.

The Usual Suspects

The soul-searching after England's long drawn out exit from the World Cup has mostly been rueful, even apologetic. With the exception of 'Arry and his mates, few have the heart to berate the players or manager. The consensus is that the country simply lacks enough top-drawer talent at present. The eagerness to blood youth reflects a hope that another (and slightly better) Golden Generation may be just around the corner, which can be thought of as whistling to keep your spirits up (the evidence of the last match against Costa Rica suggests a long wait). While the inquiry has been half-hearted, it has still rounded up the usual suspects, so we may as well mosey through the identity parade.

The Premier League remains a popular villain, specifically in respect of the number of foreign players "taking our boys' jobs", but no one seriously expects the money juggernaut to change course. After all, if you can't shame Richard Scudamore into resigning over his sexism, what hope is there in an appeal to his chauvinism? There is also an acknowledgement that other countries seem able to overcome similar challenges. Fellow bag-packers Italy also have a high percentage of non-native players, and were pioneers in the use of imported talent in the domestic game, but they've also won the tournament four times, embarrassing defeats to various Koreas notwithstanding. You can't put this down to Fascism or "wiliness" alone.

With the exception of a few snipes at Greg Dyke, the FA has escaped blame, largely because of the increased professionalism of recent years and the tangible investment at Burton and Wembley. Dyke's recent 4-point plan was reduced by an unsympathetic media to the slightly desperate proposal for Premier League B-teams, but the key idea was actually to ban non-EU players outside of the top flight, which is a recognition of the symbiosis between the different divisions. Before the Premier League, lower division clubs operated by selling-on promising youngsters to higher division clubs and by extending the careers of older top-division players, using the latter to help develop the former. They now act more as clearing houses for Premier League academy rejects. The downward flow of old pros has reduced to a trickle, as players can retire rich after a decade in the top division, with the void being filled by cheap imports of developed players in their mid-20s. This has increased the non-native population, but there is little evidence it is reducing opportunities for native youngsters, and some evidence it is increasing quality overall.

Another popular culprit is the corrupting influence of TV money, which has funded the high-churn academies, pushed up wages (thereby attracting quality imports), and encouraged club owners to buy success. The insinuation by 'Arry that some players don't fancy the hassle of playing for the national team feeds the popular prejudice that they're all spoilt brats. However, that theory sits oddly with the greater success of Italy and Spain since the 1980s, despite the dominance of TV money (heavily biased towards the larger clubs) in those countries. As is clear from the regular stories about youth player poaching between English and continental clubs, the top European teams are operating in a single market, even without taking the Champions League into account. If money has had an effect over the last 25 years, it has been in facilitating the greater homogenisation of playing styles, evidenced in the seamless movement of top coaches between countries.

The decline of school playing fields and council facilities is sometimes fingered, but this is probably more a symptom rather than a cause. The root problem looks like the recasting of secondary education as a constant slog, with regular testing and exam anxiety depriving both kids and teachers of the hours needed to invest in organised sport. Added to convenient distractions such as multi-channel TV, Facebook and FIFA14, the issue may be a lack of bored kids as much as a lack of playing fields. That said, the grassroots game continues to produce plenty of raw talent, which is eagerly snapped up by the academies. As the Dyke commission noted, and with the happy coincidence of England winning the Under-17 European Championships this year, the problem is not producing talent at schoolboy level but progressing it between 17 and 21.

One possible explanation for this stunted growth is cultural isolation, with few English professionals playing abroad and international loans of young players limited to the non-English. Joel Campbell of Arsenal has now had spells at Lorient, Real Betis and Olympiakos; his London-born clubmate Chuks Aneke has had spells at Stevenage, Preston and Crewe. But the idea that English youth is missing out on advanced coaching makes little sense when they can rub shoulders with the World's best players in the Premier League and benefit from the tutelage of managers such as Wenger, Mourinho and (shortly) van Gaal. It's also worth remembering that Roy Hodgson has been anything but insular in his managerial career. The fact that neither he nor Capello could get England to look like a team that enjoys keeping the ball suggests that the problem is not poor coaching.

In the longer perspective, England may simply be finding its natural level as a middle-ranking football power: somewhere between Belgium and France. The story of the twentieth century can be divided into two periods: denial up to 1953 (the famous defeat by Hungary at Wembley), and delusion thereafter (1966 was a fortunate victory, and not just because of the Russian linesman). However, England's poor record compared to the likes of Italy, France and Holland suggests that it is objectively under-performing. Perhaps the problem is psychological: the weight of national expectation and the fear of failure. But the suspicion that a hyperbolic and frequently vicious press isn't helping runs up against the counter-argument that it is no worse than the media in other countries. This week the London papers have been tame in comparison to the outpourings of rage and self-doubt in Spain and Italy.

The general air of "to be honest, we didn't expect much" among England fans suggests that they had already mentally invested in a transition period before the flight to Brazil. Gerrard and Lampard are now history, and I doubt Rooney will be wearing the captain's armband in Russia except as a sentimental cameo. The clamour for youth looks particularly harsh on Leighton Baines, whose window of opportunity between the limpet-like Ashley Cole and the puppy-like Luke Shaw has been quickly shut. In the cases of Chris Smalling and Phil Jones, the promotion of youth looks frankly reckless. It is some achievement to make Gary Cahill and Phil Jagielka look good in comparison after only one match. Hodgson would do well to have a chat with van Gaal before he boards the plane back to London, to establish if either centre-back has much of a future at Manure.

Though most commentary has focused on the inadequacy of the defence, the real cause for concern should be the lack of midfield creativity. At this elite level, where defenders are well-organised and mobile (not England, obviously), you need a decent short ball-player or two, not a through-force-of-circumstances "quarter-back" like Gerrard launching long. Wilshere showed promise against Costa Rica, but struggled due to the lack of clever movement up front. Sturridge remains a player who thrives in the confusion caused by others (yes, I'm thinking of "Chewy Louie"), but is unable to unbalance defences on his own, while Sterling is a player who makes eye-catching runs because he often starts from a poor position. Ross Barkley appears to have inherited the mantle of "strong lad with quick feet" bequeathed by Gascoigne and inadequately worn by Rooney, but lacks guile and subtlety. Naturally, 'Arry suggests England build their team around him.

In the 70s and 80s, the serial under-achievement of England was put down to too many blazers at the FA, the insularity and arrogance of coaches, and the technical backwardness of the players. This produced a style of play on the pitch that was unique to England and impossible to confuse with any other nation (even Scotland and Wales managed to look more continental). The paradox of the last quarter century, from the false dawn of Italia 90 through the hyper-professionalism of the Premier League and the reform of the FA, is that an England team, made up of highly-developed players who regularly hold their own with the world's best at club level, still looks like England.

The Golden Age

One of the minor amusements of the World Cup has been the adverts on ITV. In between Ray Winstone taste-testing the odds, and the iPhone bidding to become your personal trainer, the football-themed ads have been dominated by the tropes of automation and global threat, ranging from Ronaldo & co battling aliens in Samsung's high-tech gimp suits (like a shit version of The Edge of Tomorrow), through Nike's Incredibles-style humans versus clones (resistance!), to Kia's production line robots turning out standardised players and stadia (resistance is useless).

The mirthful words "Zlatan agrees", from the Nike mini-epic, ran through my head as I browsed Our Work Here Is Done: Visions of a Robot Economy, a free e-book from Nesta, which styles itself as the "UK's innovation foundation". It's free because it comprises a collection of short essays that are little more than souped-up blog posts and extended adverts for other books, rather than any original research or profound analysis. Most of the observations about job polarisation and the relationship of technology to inequality are well-worn and bordering on the anodyne. That said, the contributions by Izabella Kaminska and Steve Randy Waldman, both of whom touch on the political aspects of technology, are worth reading, though they're pretty much in keeping with their previous musings at FT Alphaville and Interfluidity.

In a rather hyperbolic plug, one of the contributors, Frances Coppola, talks of the robot economy as an imminent "golden age", which is a reference to the cyclical theories of Carlota Perez. The idea that technology advances in long waves, alternating spurts of innovation with longer periods of exploitation, is a commonplace. Perez dates the start of the current cycle, the ICT revolution, to 1971 and the introduction of the Intel microprocessor, though the start of the Unix epoch is surely as significant. Technology wave theory remains embedded in a hardware paradigm, hence the inextinguishable yearning for jet-packs and the excitement over robot cars. This also leads to an underestimation of the multiplier effects of software, i.e. that code components can be reused and refactored even more extensively and cheaply than machine parts or manufacturing techniques.

Coppola believes that new times require new leaders: "In the past, the direction of change has been set by visionaries. In the 1930s, economic thought was led by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, and the American President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented far-reaching policy reforms". In reality, Keynes was a marginal figure during the period (his ideas had more impact in Germany than the USA or UK) and FDR was no fan. The Keynesian consensus is a product of the 1940s. The moral of this tale is that ideas come to the fore when they match the prevailing view: supply meets demand. Faced with an existential crisis in 1940, Britain quickly socialised its economy. Faced with the task of rebuilding after 1945, and accepting that a return to the market orthodoxy of the thirties would risk another slump, Keynes's view of a managed economy was a pragmatic compromise. Visionary it was not.

Casting round the landscape for new thought-leaders, Coppola is optimistic: "One of the defining features of the information technology and communications revolution is the decline of the individual decision-maker and the growth of collaboration, teams and sharing. ... But we are now seeing the same phenomenon in other areas too. The 'hive mind' created by social media and similar technologies is far more powerful than any individual could possibly be, and from it can come not only original ideas but a real impetus for change". I'm surprised to see anyone still pushing the idea that the hive-mind is an unalloyed force for good. It's as if Twitter had never been invented. The hive-mind is a classic hardware paradigm: imagining that multiple brains connected over the Internet are the equivalent of parallel processors. It is also a failure to understand basic mathematical laws. The reason the 'ask the audience' lifeline in quiz shows has a high success rate is because of normal distribution not aggregate intelligence.

Coppola cites as proof of this collective wisdom the coincidence that the Q&A panel at the book launch (i.e. the contributors) all agreed that a basic income was desirable, essentially as a means of maintaining aggregate demand and providing the wherewithal for people to pursue poorly-paid vocations (academia, journalism, music etc, rather than pigeon-racing). Of course, this coincidence is proof only of groupthink. Basic income has become a credible option in social and economic debate in developed countries since 2000 (ideas come to the fore when they match the prevailing view), reflecting both angst at the increasing redundancy of the traditional working class and a fear that without some form of "dole" the under-educated hoi polloi will resort to violence. The real question is what form a basic income takes, which is ultimately a debate about power and privilege.

I'm also sceptical of Coppola's reading of history. Different eras adopt different (and complex) attitudes towards the collective and the individual, which reflects the material base and consequent social norms. The reality of innovation, whether in music or technology, is a fluid mixture of contributions from formal organisation, ad hoc collaboration and individual insight. The lone genius, oblivious to the world, is as much a myth as the highly-trained, complementary team (an orchestra playing Beethoven's 9th is a perfect combo of symbols). The long march of history has undoubtedly moved from the necessity of collectivism to the possibilities of individual liberation, but the paradox is that the social and psychic damage caused by this evolution has increased the scope and value of collective action. The paradox of our "post-collective" age is that hyper-connectivity, i.e. social media, has reduced the "impetus for change" to emotivist spasms (this week's Twitchfork riot over Michael Fabricant is another lesson in futility).

The Nesta e-book shows the sherpas of thought-leadership still faffing about in the foothills, largely reluctant to address issues of class and property, and still hoping that a consensus among the well-bred will produce a "vision" of the future in which we can all, in Keynes phrase, "live wisely and agreeably and well". In contrast, the TV adverts reveal that we remain in fearful awe of technology, attracted by the promise of personal empowerment and collective perfection, but repelled by the presumed loss of humanity and the threat of alienation. The idea that our only defence is the collective neck muscles of Ronaldo, Rooney and Ibrahimovic is depressing. If they could get a tooled-up, young Ray Winstone on side, that would make a lot of difference.